


Conscious, Conscientious, Cognizant (repeat)

by dareyoutoread



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hiatus Prompt Fill, LJ 60 prompts in 60 days, potentially excessive use of prompts, prompt: all 60 of them! :-D
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 19:58:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/944028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dareyoutoread/pseuds/dareyoutoread
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A one-shot of semi-related vignettes from Miles' point of view, taking place between five and six years after the Blackout. Written for the LiveJournal "60 prompts in 60 days" challenge as a (successful!) attempt to include all 60 prompts in one fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conscious, Conscientious, Cognizant (repeat)

**Author's Note:**

> If you're playing "spot the prompts," they're in my own version of reverse order, starting with the bottom right-hand corner of the table and working my way up each column.

The echo of the last gunshot has barely faded from the battlefield before Miles is on his feet, giving orders, shoving the wounded toward the med tent and the shell-shocked into action. By virtue of whichever well meaning but clearly naïve deity has protected him thus far, he’s uninjured – and grateful for it. An amputee in the post-Blackout world is only barely a step up from a dead man, and he’s seen too many of his men in the past few months lose a limb – or worse – to an injury that would have been sterilized, treated, and laughed off five years ago.

But the rules of modern medicine no longer apply, and so Miles is pretty fucking thankful to have Lady Luck as his patron saint. Still, his hands shake a little as he helps Bass haul a burned and scarred teenager from the rubble of a collapsed building – _shit_ , they were enlisting young these days. It’s just residual adrenaline, but God, you’d think he’d have used that all up years ago – like maybe in fucking Iraq.

Bass hovers by his left shoulder – there, always there, like he’s afraid to leave Miles without his protection – and after they dump the body (the kid hadn’t made it), he rubs a sweaty hand through his hair and offers, “We could raise the enlistment age.” Of course he’d noticed. Bass always notices.

“They think it’s a goddamned honor.” Miles’ voice sounds hollow even to him.

An hour later, they’re bent over a map spread on a piece of broken plywood between two stacks of rocks when a sergeant lights the fire to burn the bodies. As Miles watches the sparks fly up from the charnel tower and dance into the night sky in a grisly parody of fireflies, he wishes to fucking hell he’d never picked up a gun in his life, never turned out to be – in Ben’s words – “good at killing.”

Because he fucking _hates_ war.

…

Nora greets him with a kiss when they finally return home, three months later, and Miles is so wired from weeks of gunfire and orders and sleeping with one eye open that he can’t actually relax and enjoy it. Besides, there are a million things on his desk to take care of – a plague in Baltimore, a man claiming to know the whereabouts of the President – probably another fake – a riot at an abandoned glass factory currently being used as a smithy for Militia weapons – and a stack of boxes Bass had ordered delivered upon his return.

Okay, honestly, the boxes probably contained mostly whiskey and condoms – Bass’s “Holy shit, we made it back alive!” gifts had always run in a similar vein – and as such, probably wouldn’t require much mental effort to go through, but honestly, Miles is so tired, he’s about one step short of pulling a Lazarus (Bass had coined the phrase one time in high school when Miles had been knocked unconscious by a line drive two days before final exams and woken up just in time to _not_ have to do any of his term papers – at the time, it had seemed like sort of a miracle).

It’s almost a week before Nora makes another attempt to tempt him. That probably meant she’d been pissed, which was food for thought. Miles has always been shit at analyzing other people’s feelings – to him, it was like trying to pull a fuzz off your own shirt in the mirror; he always managed to miss it by just a fraction – but he feels a pang of remorse at having let Nora down. She’s good people – and a goddamned terrifying explosives artist – and though their unspoken bargain basically consists of her showing up in his bed whenever she feels like it, he’s less than content with the idea of her being disappointed in him.

He resolves to be a little more attentive next time. It’s not like he has to go all “till death do us part” and “eternal, happy union” with her – hell, she’d stab him with a stick of dynamite for even _thinking_ that – but it probably wouldn’t kill him to pull out the white gloves and candlelight every once in a while.

Besides, he can be as charming as Bass when he wants to.

All evidence to the contrary.

…

Miles will never know whether it’s serendipity or bad karma that brings him news of his missing brother for the first time in five years. It’s not like Ben is exactly his Doppelganger, and he’d pretty much given up hope after the first three years of searching that anyone was going to a.) recognize Ben or b.) bother to bring that information to Miles. 

But he knows Ben, and the fact that he’d chosen to ride out the post-Blackout storm in an idyllic country hamlet is just…like him. 

When he finally does see Ben again, it’s like undergoing a bizarre form of time travel. Because he’s General fucking Matheson, the Butcher of Baltimore and ruler of the better part of the civilized world, but the way Ben looks at him – like he’s roughly equivalent to the dirt you scrape from under your fingernails – _still_ manages to make him feel inadequate. Or maybe it’s the gradual mortification of his soul that’s done that. 

Either way, he doesn’t stay long.

When he gets back home, Bass hands him another case of whiskey, this time with a scrawled note ( _“What happens in Philly…”_ ). So he gets so drunk he can’t remember his own name, and blacks out somewhere between bottles one and two.

He’s just glad when he wakes up that it’s Nora in the bed next to him (her skin all parchment-smooth and glowing in the firelight like a goddamned paper lantern), and not Bass, sprawled out in the room’s only chair. 

Because drinking with Nora meant that they probably hadn’t been doing a whole lot of talking. Drinking with Bass is _all_ talking, and for some reason, Miles hasn’t told his best friend about tracking down Ben. It’s Bass’s Achilles’ heel, this thing about Ben and the power, and Miles doesn’t know if his best friend would honestly try to Frankenstein together some machine to turn the lights back on, but the way Bass talks about it makes it sound like he’s contracted some obsessive disease, and Miles would just rather the contagion not spread.

Bass already spends enough time brooding. 

Miles isn’t sure if that makes him a crappy patriot to the Monroe Republic (seeing as Bass is President and all), but given that Bass spends more than half of his time at home these days with his face in a book – he’s currently reading a biography of Margaret Thatcher, of all people (though he insists on calling her “Maggie” like she’s one of the girls he sleeps with – and maybe he _does_ sleep with the book some nights, and if so, that’s pretty damn sad) – he’s pretty sure he’s doing the guy a favor by not piling on more excuses for him to sacrifice his social life for his pursuit of… 

What exactly is it Bass is pursuing? World domination? A _Butterfly Effect_ -like reversal of the Blackout?

There’d been a guy in their unit back in Iraq, a second lieutenant named Underhill, who’d lost it after an IED took out everyone in his squad except him. He took to spending all of his free time alone, drawing up increasingly crazier plans for how the U.S. could force an enemy surrender, but he’d hidden it pretty well, and no one had realized how unhinged the man actually was until an accident set his tent aflame and burned up all of his “tactical plans.” Miles and a captain named Gregson had had to physically drag Underhill away from the afterglow of the fire as he babbled nonsense and blistered his hands trying to reach into the coals.

People did weird shit when they got obsessed. 

So, though to keep his knowledge of Ben’s whereabouts from Bass feels a little like a betrayal, Miles keeps his mouth stapled shut.

It’s for Bass’s own good.

… 

Miles figures he’s on about his ninth life when he wakes up in their makeshift field hospital after Trenton. There’s a fuzzy feeling in his abdomen, like it’s running its own mini hot springs, and Bass informs him this is the result of a pretty nasty gut wound plus copious amounts of morphine. Later, Jeremy informs him that Bass has been back and forth from his bedside fifteen times a day like he’s engaged in a goddamn courtship, but they both laugh, because hell, they’re all relieved he’s alive.

Much later, Miles sits at a table, bandages wrapped around his abdomen, poring over the reasons for their defeat. Because Trenton _had_ been a defeat – a crushing one, and if Wheatley, Jeremy, and Neville hadn’t rallied the troops into a less than totally disastrous retreat, it could have been the end of the Monroe Militia.

And it would have been Miles’ fault. 

He’s about to go over the maps again when Bass shoves back the tent flap and interrupts his brooding. “You know why we lost at Trenton, man?”

Miles raises his head, and an eyebrow.

“’Cause it’s the fucking Wild West out here,” Bass concludes emphatically. Then he sweeps Miles’ papers unceremoniously from the table and offers him a hand up. “Now get the fuck up and come play cards with us. Jeremy’s _killing_ Hanes and me at rummy. World’s not gonna’ end if you stop poring over those damn maps for a night.”

Bass is right. Shit, Bass is _right._ He’s gotten too far in his own head about all this, and, not for the first time, he thinks about giving Bass a little more of the military control – just on a trial basis. Miles needs a break, and (obviously) a second pair of eyes to tell him when his grand plan is about to turn into a shitfest.

He trails after Bass out of the tent toward one of the closest fires, where Jeremy and their field doctor, Hanes, greet them with a jovial wave (Jeremy) and an offer of rum (Hanes). They’re midway through an argument about the difference between “dissemble” and “disassemble,” with Jeremy staunchly defending the position that one is just a misspelling of the other, and Hanes rolling his eyes and accusing Jeremy of being “a damned _math_ teacher, not an English teacher.” 

Bass flops down onto the foldout cot that Jeremy has press-ganged into service as a chair and says, like he’s rattling it off from a dictionary: “”Dissemble’ means to hide your real feelings or motives. ‘Disassemble’ means to take apart.”

Miles stretches out his lanky legs on the ground next to the fire, leaning his back against a big rock as he listens to the three men banter. The warm rock feels good against his sore back, and he decides he’s too tired to participate in their discussion or the game. In fact, he’s too tired for any of it – too tired to disassemble _or_ dissemble his feelings on life, the Militia, the Republic, _this_. 

But Bass is right. Sometimes you just need to take a break.

So Miles Matheson leans back his head against the warm, solid stone behind him, and takes a goddamned nap. 


End file.
